I would sit down to lunch with a friend, and then quite literally be unable to speak. I would stutter, I would gulp — but no words would come out.
This strikes me as a very symptomatic story to illustrate the issue of depression among men. Because we don’t like to talk about it.
Impossible challenge: Men are expected to be strong yet sensitive, successful but not materialistic and caring yet masculine
This week Paul Farmer, the chief executive of the mental health charity MIND, underlined my own experiences by suggesting that because men tend to suffer depression in silence, they often go undiagnosed.
This, he suggests, is one of the reasons why three quarters of suicides are men.
Another reason, according to Mr Farmer, is that GPs are more inclined to identify the condition in women, and are not even trained to spot it in men.
And we do hear a lot about women and their battle against depression. Last week in the Mail, Allison Pearson described in vivid detail her battle with acute depression, and her testimony comes hard on the heels of a spate of high-profile confessions of breakdown from other high-achieving women.
Writers Stephanie Merritt, Marian Keyes and Sally Brampton have all described in detail how they were laid low by this crippling disability.
Other high-profile figures — among them actress Emma Thompson and Coronation Street star Beverley Callard — have recently confessed to going through patches of acute mental distress.
No one can deny that there is a serious problem with depression among women. But how often do you hear about a man’s experiences?
MIND says that men are just as likely to suffer depression as women, but that men manifest it in different ways — for instance anger and violence — and are far less likely to admit there is a problem in the first place. It is too big a blow to their self-esteem.
Being a lifelong sufferer of depression myself, I know that the main sources of it, along with the obvious ones of stress and genetic inheritance, are uncertainty and confusion.
The fluidity of the roles we are expected to play in modern life, both professionally and emotionally, and as fathers and husbands, can lead to a lot of painful doubt about what the role of a man actually is.
People can cope with a great deal of unhappiness if they are clear about where the unhappiness stems from and what can and can’t be done about it.
Unhappiness bleeds into depression when doubts about your own self-worth and your place in the world are constantly whirling in your mind.
Sure, it’s fair to say some of those problems are part of the lot of modern women.
Out in the open: Actress Emma Thompson, left, and television presenter Fiona Phillips have both spoken about feelings of depression
Having been sold the myth that they can ‘have it all’, they find that they are faced with pair after pair of irreconcilable opposites.
Modern women quite reasonably want to have successful, satisfying careers and be good mothers and good friends and valuable members of the local community.
They also want to remain desirable and perhaps fashionable, even if they are run ragged by small children all day. Who wouldn’t?
But to put these things into practice is intolerably difficult, which is doubtless why these testimonies about female depression have struck such a nerve.
However, men are subject to their own set of contradictions, too, which can lead to deep confusion and mental anguish.
We are expected to be strong yet sensitive, successful but not materialistic, caring yet masculine — and squaring these circles is a painful, if not impossible, challenge.
While there have been specific triggers for the episodes of depression that have affected me throughout my adult life, like all too many other men I am very aware of the confusing expectations placed upon me.
Apart from anything else, if men confess a bout of depression to their wives or partners, they are not always guaranteed automatic sympathy — in fact they may elicit outright hostility.
If a woman works, more demands are likely to be placed on the man in terms of his role in the family and caring for the children
Men are still expected be ‘strong’, and to show what can be perceived as weakness can not only be a shock to themselves, but to their wives.
I have been told by several men that a not uncommon response from women is ‘I don’t need another child to look after. Sort yourself out.’
Even my wife, who is trained as a nurse, sometimes struggles to deal with my depressive episodes. After all, depressives do not behave sympathetically — and men with depression often conform to the stereotype of bad male behaviour, becoming grumpy, irritable and withdrawn.
Everywhere, the blurring of the gender roles produces more reasons for anxiety and conflict in men. The assumptions men used to be able to make about their place in society, their worth, their role in the family, have been largely swept away.
If the man earns more than the woman, it was once assumed that his career should have priority. At least then he was clear about his most important role in life, as provider for his family.
No longer. Now, many women consider that to have a rewarding career is a right, irrespective of how much they happen to earn.
And if a woman is at work, more demands are likely to be placed on the man in terms of his role in the family and caring for the children. A recent study suggested that 45 per cent of women now earn as much or more than their husbands — which represents another threat to the male ego.
Given how much men’s identities are tied up with their being breadwinners, this can often spark deep-seated feelings of worthlessness and insecurity.
(This is even more marked if a man loses his job, which is why there’s a great deal of depression among unemployed men: one in seven men who are made unemployed can expect to suffer depression in the ensuing six months.)
A time will doubtless come when men are more relaxed about their wife earning more than them, or even sharing the role of breadwinner, but I suspect it hasn’t come yet to many, particularly among middle-aged men — that is, statistically the group most at risk of depression — who were brought up with a different set of expectations.
Identity loss: One in seven men who lose their job will suffer six months' depression
On a more mundane level, the blurring of gender borders has led to many new roles for a man to adopt.
He is expected now to have a view on what the curtains should look like, he should do his fair share of the cooking and housework (though trying to discover what the word ‘fair’ means in this context is enough to give anyone a breakdown).
None of this is unreasonable, but there are an awful lot of mental habits men have had to cast off, and a lot of new roles to adopt. And learning anything anew can be a slow and ungainly process, making men feel maladroit and useless.
Quite apart from the confusions of these new roles that are demanded of men, there are straightforward practical problems.
Allison Pearson writes of the problems of being a ‘sandwich mother’ — ie leaving it late to have children and then finding yourself having to look after ageing parents as well.
But the same, naturally, applies to ‘sandwich fathers’, who may also have to take on the burden of ageing parents.
Men do have it better in some ways — partly because their desires and needs tend to be more straightforward. Most men I know can go to work every day without feeling guilty about not seeing their children except in the evenings and at weekends.
Most men don’t follow fashion that closely or worry about their body image particularly.
However, there is still a long list of things that can make the modern man unhappy.
Central among these is that men are more subject to loneliness than women, because they enjoy less solid social networks and tend to be less supportive of one another.
This is a problem particularly if divorce is an outcome — statistics show that women cope with separation far better than men.
The very physical and straightforward love and friendship that exists among women is much more subtle among men, reduced often to a backslap and a handshake.
I remember times when I was in acute mental distress being quite unable to phone up a male friend to tell him I was desperate.
I was simply too ashamed — and I also imagined that my male friend wouldn’t have a clue what to say. Men often just don’t have the practice, or the mental equipment to unburden themselves emotionally to another person.
Another less obvious trigger for men’s unhappiness is having an unhappy woman as a partner. This is because many men still see their success as a husband as being connected with their ability to create a world in which their wives or partners can feel content.
Confession: Beverley Callard - pictured as Liz McDonald in Coronation Street with son Steve played by Simon Gregson - is recovering from a nervous breakdown
There are still some women, whether they acknowledge it or not, who expect that men should be able to make them happy (the myth of a knight on the white charger who will rescue the heroine and give her a happy-ever-after ending is a template of every Mills & Boon novel).
So if a woman is not happy and can’t work out why, it’s quite easy to attach blame to the husband. And thus many men I speak to feel under-appreciated.
Many women make it a priority to be good friends, good mothers, good members of the community or good at their job, but many don’t really think of being appreciative of their husbands — or, if you like, a ‘good wife’.
After all, that is what those housewives of the 1950s aspired to, and modern women are determined not to go back to what many of them see as a dreary prison. So perhaps it’s the case that many modern men are struggling to accept they are no longer the focus of attention for their wives and children in the way their fathers and grandfathers would have been. Conversely, however, many men do worry about being good husbands.
And the experience of many of them — if the happiness of their wives is anything to go by — is that they are failing. I know I often feel responsible and suffer feelings of guilt when my wife is unhappy within herself.
So what is the solution to these very modern problems that are leaving so many men confused and unhappy? I can think of a few modest steps forward. First, perhaps women need to lower their expectations — of themselves, and their husbands.
And both sexes might want to try putting one another first, ahead of work, friends and children. I think this is one good traditional idea that has been allowed to wane under the weight of other imperatives.
Last, I would say that men have to understand that suffering depression does not make you less of a man. That is something women also have to understand about men, and it is something they should learn from their own collective experience — that depression does not mean weakness, and it does not mean that your husband is failing to support you or the family, that they do not have sufficiently ‘broad shoulders’.
It means that they are vulnerable, too, just like women. It means that they need help.
For both sexes, striving for perfection in all areas of our lives is admirable, but if our expectations are unrealistic, then they are doomed — and deep unhappiness will surely follow.
We shouldn’t expect to be happy all the time anyway — unhappiness is a normal part of the human condition, and to expect otherwise is a source of unhappiness itself.
Perhaps instead of striving for the best of all worlds, we should simply strive to be humble and grateful for what we have got. Women have it tough. Men have it tough, too.
The way we’re going to get through this is together — without blaming ourselves, or each another. ( dailymail.co.uk )
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